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How-To Geek

If you’ve got a perfectly functional but boring alarm clock this Chumby-powered hack will upgrade its old Beep-Beep to a custom readout of the weather and daily headlines.

Thomas shares, on his personal project blog FeedYourHead, a tutorial for hacking a $10 off the shelf alarm clock to accept input from a Chumby development board (essentially a bare bones version of the commercial Chumby device). He wired the audio output on the Chumby into the alarm clock’s speaker, plugged a spare Belkin Wi-Fi dongle into the board, and wrote a bit of code to pull in the weather and top headlines for the day and read them aloud in place of the alarm clock’s buzz.

Hit up the link below for additional photos and the source code for his project.

Jason Fitzpatrick is a warranty-voiding DIYer who spends his days cracking opening cases and wrestling with code so you don't have to. If it can be modded, optimized, repurposed, or torn apart for fun he's interested (and probably already at the workbench taking it apart). You can follow him on Twitter if you'd like.

Published 09/1/11

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